vacanti

Author of the post here. Agreed with the general criticism of the title and have changed it to "How I Learned to Code".

I don't think you're wrong. It's a personal choice based on one's perceived strengths. Some people don't think it's a lottery. They think they can replicate success.

Personally, I do think there is skill involved unlike a lottery. But, I still think there's a fair amount of luck, too. In the end, I'm not sure I would start another company that didn't have the option of becoming profitable right away.

That's a good question. If you can create a startup that's profitable day one, that's great.

But, there are lots of businesses that need a fixed cost base that only turn profitable after millions of users. But, they turn very profitable with tens of millions of users.

If you restrict yourself to just ideas that are profitable day one, that's great though you may miss out on some great ideas.

Sorry for the confusion. I just made it more clear by changing it to 1.5 to 3 actual months.

Assuming both parties are rationale, I would suggest the timeframe be more based on completion of a goal (e.g., transition someone else to the role or complete this project you were working on) rather than a specific time like two weeks.

The post was loosely based on our experience years ago. We now have many users and our conversion rates are much higher.

I just wanted people to know that getting some PR isn't the finish line, it's the start of the race.

ugh. sorry. looking into it. thanks for letting me know.

I would tell them to focus on a big problem that they are passionate about and have some credibility.

I just added reasoning next to each quote on why people regret saying them.

Of all the excuses I listed, I think fear of failure is the root cause.

Completely agree. I always try to tell entrepreneurs that I believe in them but then give the critical feedback on their idea / process.

That's good advice on getting married to the problem. We clearly weren't married to it.

That being said, you should still experiment on the problem you are solving as opposed to waiting for 6 months to roll something out.

Definitely not 100% conclusive evidence. But, after sending it to our almost 1,000 friends and families and seeing just 2 urls submitted after a week, we knew it was going to be widely used. After all, these are people very motivated to try the product (or I guess they could secretly not like us...)

We just posted on how Yipit handles settings: http://tech.yipit.com/2011/11/02/django-settings-what-to-do-...

First post on how Yipit handles Django Settings is up: http://tech.yipit.com/2011/11/02/django-settings-what-to-do-...